Carriers of a bloodline that can be traced back to one of Ireland’s greatest warrior kings, the Flanagans played a key role at pivotal points in the island’s dramatic history.
Allied as they were to the Royal O’Connors, they were at the forefront of the struggle for freedom and independence, while many thrive to this day through rather more peaceful endeavours and pursuits.
In the world of the written word, Thomas Flanagan was the American professor of English literature who was the author of a series of Irish historical novels that include the 1979 The Year of the French.
In politics, Oliver J. Flanagan was the socially conservative Irish Fine Gael party politician who served in the Irish Parliament, Dáil Éireann, for 43 years until his retirement from politics in 1987, and who once memorably declared that ‘there was no sex in Ireland before television’.
Chronicled here are the vibrant lives and times of the Flanagans.
Flanagan Clan Mini-Book Excerpt
One truly original and creative Flanagan is the American inventor Gillis Flanagan, born in 1944 in Oklahoma.
The holder of advanced degrees in an impressive range of subjects that include medicine and chemistry, he was the inventor at the age of only 14 of the Neurophone – a device that transmits sound through the skin to the brain.
The invention earned him a profile in Life Magazine in which he was described as a ‘unique, mature, and inquisitive scientist.’
Flanagan claims that as a small child he had a recurrent dream in which he was visited by aliens who measured his intelligence by placing a silver helmet over his head.
They then told him that if his superior intelligence did not match their expectations then he and the rest of the world would be destroyed.
